The Golem in the Attic: Rodinsky's Room and Jewish Memory

Abstract

This article focuses on Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's co-authored text Radinsky's Room (1999). The discussion reads the text's figuring of David Rodinsky as an absent presence in particular relation to the Jewish golem legend. In developing the connection between collective myth and Lichtenstein's pursuit of Rodinsky's story the article draws from Jonathan Boyarin and David Roskies' theorisation of cultural memory and Jewish identity in order to ask questions about the interplay between remembering and forgetting in the construction of contemporary Jewish identity.